


The Early Bird Catches The Worm

by Sculpts



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Mornings, POV Sherlock Holmes, Sharing a Bed, these boys will be the death of me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-13
Updated: 2014-06-13
Packaged: 2018-02-04 11:12:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1777018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sculpts/pseuds/Sculpts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John’s been trying since the outset to tame him into some sort of regularity of schedule. It’s unlikely he ever imagined this would be what finally brought Sherlock in to heel, but one morning at a time he’s achieving his goal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Early Bird Catches The Worm

Ah. Morning. 

For a very long time, Sherlock hadn’t been the greatest patron of mornings. At least not early ones. There’s nothing in particular to be held against them, of course, mornings are simply the beginning of another day, but for the most part he’s only greeted mornings either having watched them arrive or having woken into them, decided himself not yet well enough rested and promptly returned to sleeping. Mornings are the product of time and time is something he prefers to disregard given any excuse - so, between a self-designed (some might say erratic: he sometimes wouldn’t stoop to dignifying those people a response, he sometimes might) sleep schedule and a general disinterest in the passage of the hours so long as they’re _full_ , mornings had come to mean relatively little. He either meets them on their way in and watches them (or doesn’t, more regularly) blossom, or he strolls into them already in full bloom some scant couple of hours before they drift off to make room for afternoon.

Times change.

Mulling things over, Sherlock examines the insides of his eyelids. In consciousness, light does odd things to his shuttered eyes. Brightness registers, as does heat, and all of it despite the absence of any real sight. There’s something about this moment, this pre-rising moment, which has always filled him with a bizarre jumble of emotion. Eagerness, _eagerness_ , always eagerness to let his eyes slide open and take in the world, find something worth _looking_ at-- or is that compulsion? Difficult to distinguish. And then there’s hesitance. _Hesitance_ to open his eyes. Hesitance to need to find something new, to set out once again on the indomitable search for something to sate him, satisfy the insatiable craving. There’s an odd moment of simultaneous elation and exhaustion that follows, a daily realisation, a moment leaving Sherlock scrabbling to gain purchase at some acceptable mid point. He doesn't, ever, but he gets close enough.

He can see his room without needing to open his eyes. It’s mapped out in his mind in exquisite, photo-realistic detail: if it were possible to hook up a printer to a human brain, he’s certain the picture he’d print would be flawless. His furniture sits in his mind exactly where it sits about him. His walls are hung with the same adornments, his windows positioned correctly to the millimetre. On his more whimsy days, with the world bright outside and casting stark contrasts of shadow and light over the sharper corners of his thoughts, Sherlock can even picture himself laying in his own bed, a birds eye view. He can watch himself and his closed, not sleeping eyes, solitary and wrapped haphazardly in the sheet after a night spent catching up on days spent running. He can see his head on the right side pillow, see the stark, creaseless flatness of the other. Untouched. Pristine. Rationally, _logically_ , the pillowcase is bound to have sustained some of the ruffles of his sleep, be something less than perfectly turned out by the time he looks upon it, but nevertheless he’s found himself unable to do anything about that aspect of the detail. Everything else in his mental projection of his surroundings is always unequivocally perfect, but that pillow remains without blemish or furrow. 

Well. He’s never been able to do anything about it. An empty pillow is an empty pillow.

Sherlock lays here now, recognising morning and staring at the backs of his eyelids and an unwrinkled pillow simultaneously, and takes a moment or two to breathe. In, two, three. Hold. One. (The light of morning grows just a little brighter.) Two. (His body hums with the freshness of air, the thorough oxygenation of blood, the slight stress of still-full lungs). Three. Breath rushes out of him in a controlled flume and Sherlock opens his eyes.

 

The smile’s hitching at his lips before he’s even fully turned his head. Can he really be blamed? No.

There he is. There. There’s morning.

The pillow, so cold and untouched in his mind's eye, has been utterly tarnished. Sherlock has no complaints.

John Watson is still asleep. Laying there, dead to the world (but not _dead_ , and he would disappear again in a moment for the continued joy of that knowledge), his nose twitches in that odd little way it does when an in-breath tweaks the hairs in his nostrils mid snuffled snore. There’s a light shadow of stubble grazing his jawline, hemming his upper lip. The lines of his face are as devoid of thought or puzzlement or pain as he’ll ever see them, and Sherlock drinks him in at his most naked, laying there under Sherlock’s sheets in the top and boxer shorts that double as his pyjamas, faking nothing. Pretending nothing. Simply being. Being John, close and uncompromised, unconcerned.

This is what has changed. This is what has changed time. Mornings didn’t mean an awful lot before. Mornings were just something he happened to rise to or herald in mid-experiment after his 26th hour of waking. Now, mornings are this. Mornings are John Watson laying next to him, sleeping. Trusting Sherlock with his unconsciousness. Watching that, watching that impossible thing, the trust of a man who wakes with a readiness to kill at the slightest sound of a step on a stair but is laying here, breathing his quiet peace out into the early light of day... it's his morning. It's all the morning he needs.

John’s been trying since the outset to tame him into some sort of regularity of schedule. It’s unlikely he ever imagined this would be what finally brought Sherlock in to heel, but one morning at a time he’s achieving his goal.

 

 

“Will you stop watching me sleep?”

Hah. Sherlock grunts, a sluggish dissent, though he’s no longer sleepy at all. He and John both are fond of the pretense that the morning light doesn’t fill every inch of him up these days, aided as it is by such a powerful conductor. It's similar to the way they're fond of John asking the same question no fewer than twice a week. "No, John."

He shifts and the sheets feel cool against his calf. It contrasts nicely with the warmth John sheds into his side.

“The early bird catches the worm.”

**Author's Note:**

> A ficlet inspired by a really cute little headcanon of [ughholmesandwatson](http://ughholmesandwatson.tumblr.com)'s! 
> 
> "When Sherlock wakes up, sometimes he keeps his eyes closed and pretends John isn't lying next to him, just so when he does look across the image of John softly snoring next to him is the best feeling in the world." 
> 
> I absolutely couldn't help myself a a a h.


End file.
